HP to Sun Customers: “We’ve Got Your Backâ€?

HP announced a new program to support the increasing number of Sun Microsystems customers looking to transition to a more cost-effective and stable server and storage platform.

HP’s Sun Complete Care program (1) combines one of the industry’s broadest technology portfolios and the company’s highly experienced team of professionals with a wide range of transition and modernization services to drive value for customers.

More than 100 customers have chosen to migrate to HP server and storage platforms over the last six months to significantly improve the return on their investments. On average, Sun customers are paying up to 80 percent more in total cost of ownership (TCO) for Sun SPARC servers than customers using HP Integrity servers. (2) Many applications are also significantly more expensive to run on SPARC servers compared with HP servers. It costs 50 percent more per core to run Oracle’s database software on SPARC than on HP Integrity. (3)

Customers moving to an HP environment can reap the benefits of the decades of experience HP and its partners have in helping minimize costs for customers. Making the transition easier than ever, the HP Sun Complete Care program offers customers a wide variety of specialized services, support programs and financial incentives. These include business case development, assessment, design, migration and support to financing options, as well as education programs and trade-in opportunities on hardware and software. Additionally, as part of the company’s ‘green’ initiative, HP will dispose of customers’ retired or obsolete technology assets.

Customers can realize significant cost savings by using an HP server platform while staying on the Solaris operating environment. They can also choose to migrate to Linux, HP-UX, or Microsoft Windows. To ease the transition, HP provides a single point of accountability for purchase and life cycle support of Solaris on HP servers. By choosing HP servers for Solaris-based applications, customers can receive superior performance, scalability and virtualization capabilities. With its industry-leading Technology Services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while also controlling costs.

Customers also receive:

• Increased reliability, innovation and manageability with HP industry-standard servers
• Reduced transition and performance risk with HP’s services supporting the entire Solaris server, storage and network environment
• Reduced operational costs through the integration of Solaris 10 with HP management and usability tools on HP servers

By switching to HP, BT Vision – an on-demand provider to broadband customers of British Telecom – saved 60 percent on server maintenance and 80 percent on hardware costs, while significantly increasing its revenue. BT Vision’s increased revenue is attributed to its Solaris-based applications running 10 times faster on HP Proliant BL460c server blades. The company also has been able to more than triple its customer capacity, from 300,000 to more than 1 million, without adding space or power requirements.

“HP helped us stay within our capacity and power requirements, and financial budget, something Sun couldn’t do,” said Philip Buckley-Mellor, designer, BT Vision. “None of that would have been possible without HP’s expertise and their server, storage and software. In addition, each HP BladeSystem server, straight out of the box, was performing up to eight times faster than the existing equipment – with tuning, it’s now well over 10 times faster.”

HP leadership delivers results and ongoing peace of mind
According to first quarter 2009 IDC Server Tracker (4) data, HP leads the industry in several major categories including total server units shipped and x86 server units and revenue. Further, HP’s broad systems and services portfolio addresses a wide variety of customer needs from small and midsize businesses to mission-critical, cloud and scale-out computing.

“As I meet with Sun customers and partners, they are adamant that they need a more stable technology provider with proven solutions, long-term roadmaps and a solid future,” said Paul Gottsegen, vice president, Integrated Marketing, Enterprise Servers and Storage, HP. “By switching to HP, Sun customers will gain peace of mind, along with significant technology and return-on-investment advantages.”

HP expertise to transition
and support customer environments

• Customers can take advantage of HP’s Sun Complete Care program to reduce their total infrastructure costs. Program elements enable customers to:
• Reduce costs and risks with free migration and TCO assessments
• Defer payments (up to 90 days) on new HP leases and take advantage of a zero-percent lease offer until Oct. 31
• Receive 15 percent trade-in credit or HP ‘green’ disposal when replacing Sun SPARC servers with HP Integrity servers or HP ProLiant DL785 servers
• Increase server reliability by trading up from running Solaris on Sun servers to running HP-UX v3 on HP Integrity servers and get 50 to 85 percent off HP-UX 11i with Solaris trade-in
• Receive up to 30 percent off training and support

Take the TCO Challenge
HP offers customers a five-minute Sun TCO Challenge to find out the potential savings advantages of transitioning to HP.

(1) Not available in all regions/countries; these offers are only available as part of this Sun migration program and may not be combinable with other offers or discounts. Customers must qualify for the incentives.

(2) Based on three-year TCO analysis comparing continued investment in Sun environment versus to moving to an HP ProLiant or HP Integrity environment. The TCO comparisons are based on the Alinean TCO/RIO tool.

(3) Leapard, Bryan, The Business Value of HP-UX 11i v3, Alinean white paper, April 2009.

(4) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, IDC, May 2009.